Decision-Making Time

For a lot of young people, adolescence is when the big decisions start piling up, and some of those decisions reach far into the rest of a life. Think about a time you said or did something you couldn't take back. That feeling shows up early and often during the teenage years.

There's a certain confidence in adolescence, a readiness to pass judgment. Not only on themselves, but on everyone around them, often parents or other adults they haven't really figured out yet. A teenager can be short-sighted in a literal sense, seeing the world mostly through one window: their own. Faults in other people jump out at them. Their own faults stay hidden. And the problems of grown-ups look simple to fix, provided the grown-up would just do the obvious thing the teenager has already worked out.

To make a reasonable choice, you usually need to understand what follows from it. That's a problem, because many of the subjects teenagers most need information about rarely come up in ordinary public settings. Traditionally that teaching was left to the family or the church. When those sources go quiet, the gap gets filled anyway, by screens or by friends who know no more than the teenager does.

It's striking, when you stop to consider it, who ends up shaping our kids. Babysitters. Preschool, if parents go that route. The parents themselves, if they decide to keep children close and shielded from outside sources. Generations of adults have tried to keep disturbing information away from their children, only to watch the children pick it up somewhere else, sometimes under conditions nobody would have chosen. Some parents treat this as serious work. Others do the bare minimum, and a few seem almost eager to push the teenager out the door at eighteen, independent on paper and unprepared in practice.

One way or another, adolescents eventually have to manage on their own. They need a sense of who they are, what they value, what they're good at. They have to decide how they'll handle being sexually active, wrestle with the question of why they're here at all, and learn to solve their own problems well enough to build a life they can enjoy. Often there's more waiting: choosing a partner, raising children, figuring out how to support themselves and anyone depending on them.

So what else lands on a teenager's plate, and are they ready for any of it? There's a physical complication here too. The part of the brain that lets a person weigh long-term consequences against short-term payoff doesn't finish developing until somewhere in young adulthood.

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